The Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke, has admitted the shortage of gas to power sector, declaring a 12-month gas supply emergency plan to address the situation.
The minister in a statement issued in Abuja yesterday, said the emergency plan was necessitated by the need to “correct the misalignment cum challenges in the nation’s gas to power aspirations.”
According to her “a close analysis of the supply chain has revealed that over the last 10 years or so, there has been significant misalignment between power projects and gas supply sources.
“With the National Integrated Power Projects (NIPP) coming on stream, there are indications of increasing pressure to meet up with the quantity of gas required as fuel to power the plants and at the correct locations,” she added.
“To quickly and holistically address the misalignment, I am immediately deploying a 12-month ‘Domestic Gas Supply Emergency Plan.’ During this period, the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, together with the NNPC and the gas producing companies will deploy extraordinary measures to accelerate opportunities for quick wins in order to ameliorate the potential gap between gas demand and supply,” she said.
To further tackle the situation, she informed that President Goodluck Jonathan has approved the appointment of Engr Kunle Allen as the substantive Chief Executive Officer for the Gas Aggregation Company of Nigeria (GACN), with a mandate to identifying gas sources/suppliers and designing incentives for accelerated domestic gas delivery, as well as provide implicit data to make the DPR? more proactive in compelling suppliers to meet domestic gas supply obligations.